Both bitcoin and 2nd place competitor hit new highs

Bitcoin and ether (Ethereum) the first and second largest cryptocurrencies respectively by market capitalization set record highs back on Thursday both continuing rallies.

Modern cash

(cc) Zach Copley (CC BY-SA 2.0)

bitcoin high

On Thursday when a coindesk article went to press it reported that one bitcoin was at a record $8,470 after starting the session at $8,201.

CoinmarketCap claims bitcoin has risen over 11.97 percent overr the last 24 hours and a whopping 39.25 percent for the entire week so far.

The market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies also reached a new high at $267.6 billion. Bitcoin alone had a market cap of $141 billion.

ether high

Ether, the coin associated with the Ethereum project rose to a new high of $485.19 before falling back to $464 at press time. This was a rise of 12 percent in a single day and 39 percent over seven days.

Ethereum is described at some length in a Wikipedia article. The platform has the capacity to create smart contracts.

The coin associated with the project is called ether. They system started back on July 30 of 2015 with 11.9 million ether coins about 13 percent of the total available.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum had hard forks with new coins

Back in 2016 Ethereum experienced a hard fork creating two blockchains with the original becoming Ethereum Classic (ETC) while the major chain is Ethereum (ETH).

As of writing this, Ethereum Classic was also enjoying a surge reaching $22.23 a share up 11.48 percent on the day. While this is much less than ether, in November of last year Ethereum Classic was trading at under a dollar a share.

Bitcoin also experienced a hard fork at the beginning of August this year forming bitcoin cash. On November 12th after another hard fork was avoided, bitcoin cash price reached a peak of over $1800 dollars.

As bitcoin cash soared and bitcoin crashed, there were some analysts claiming that bitcoin cash would eventually surpass bitcoin. Many were selling bitcoin and buying bitcoin cash. Bitcoin cash had blocks eight times larger than bitcoin which should make transactions faster.

Bitcoin had another hard fork on November 23rd creating Bitcoin Gold. Present price was $340.83 down over 12 percent on the day.

Present prices of bitcoin and and ether

As of Saturday afternoon the price of bitcoin (BCH) in US dollars was $8,661 several hundred dollars above its Thursday record high and up 5.6 percent on the day.

On the other hand, Ethereum was a bit down on the day by 1.44 percent. at $467.73 but still not much below its peak on Thursday.

Another doomsayer

Ulrich Stephan, chief strategist at Deutsche Bank Germany’s global banking and financial services company, said that he would not recommend bitcoin to the everyday investor. He noted that bitcoin's price fluctuates too much and there is no regulation of its trading.

However, if someone bought bitcoin at the beginning of the year they would find the value of their purchase had increased by eight times.

The appended video is of an interview with Rick Falkvinge CEO of bitcoin cash with RT about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This is an interesting interview. Falkvinge has some astounding views as to how high in price bitcoin could go.

Falkvinge also warns people that they should be ready to lose all the money they put into bitcoin or they should not buy it.